Tuesday, June 21, 2011

I just get an email of Google which was interesting to say the least... and I wish I could tell the people we develop Oracle APEX apps for the same! Developing web applications that are browser compliant (especially older browsers) is just taking so much time! It would be really nice if it was common to only need to support the last 3 versions.

Here is the email:

Beginning on August 1, 2011, Google Apps support for the following browsers versions will be DISCONTINUED:

- Microsoft Internet Explorer 7

- Mozilla Firefox 3.5

- Apple Safari 3

After August 1, you may have trouble using certain features in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites with these older browsers, and eventually these apps may stop working entirely.

WHY THE CHANGE?

To give users the best experience with Google Apps, we need the capabilities of modern browsers to deliver features such as desktop notifications for Gmail and drag-and-drop file upload in Google Docs.

For this reason, beginning August 1, 2011, Google Apps will support the current and previous major releases of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we’ll begin supporting that version and stop supporting the third-oldest version.

This is disturbing, to say the least. I spend half of my time onsite, with a client that still thinks that IE6 is the greatest thing since sliced bread! And RittmanMead uses Google Apps for all our needs ....

I stumbled upon this yesterday: http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/. As much as I hate to think of doing something like that, how else can you write current software to deploy at sites that *might* get to IE 8 in 2022..? I'm trying the Chrome Frame with some sample apps this weekend, including using it to pull in some of Google's software to see if it will run.